Nvidia says cryptomining fever has dried up

According to Reuters Nvidia Corp shares sank as much as 5 percent in after-hours trading on Thursday after the chip maker said cryptocurrency-fueled demand had dried up and it forecast sales below Wall Street targets, overshadowing quarterly results that otherwise beat expectations.

The company’s bleak outlook for cryptocurrency chips was a sharp reversal from the prior fiscal quarter, when sales to so-called miners of digital currencies such as bitcoin and ethereum amounted to $289 million, nearly a 10th of Nvidia’s revenue. Nvidia previously had forecast sales for cryptocurrency chips for the fiscal second quarter ended July 29 of about $100 million. On Thursday it reported actual revenue of only $18 million.

“Whereas we had previously anticipated cryptocurrency to be meaningful for the year, we are now projecting no contributions going forward,” Nvidia said. It projected third-quarter revenue of $3.25 billion, plus or minus 2 percent, falling short of analyst estimates of $3.34 billion, according to Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S.

Ahead of a conference call with analysts, shares were down 3.6 percent to $248, still quadruple their value two years ago. Shares of Nvidia’s chief rival in the graphics chip market, Advanced Micro Devices Inc, have also been whipsawed by swings in the cryptocurrency markets.

Analysts were troubled by Nvidia’s gross margin forecast of 62.8 percent, slightly below expectations of 62.9 percent and possibly a result of putting more memory modules on its chips.

Analyst KinNgai Chan of Summit Insights Group said Nvidia shares were likely to trade lower as analysts reset their expectations around slower growth rates.

The cryptocurrency news and the lower-than-expected forecast clouded an otherwise strong quarter, including Nvidia’s sales of chips to data centers, where companies such as Amazon.com’s Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Corp’s Azure as well as Alphabet Inc’s Google Cloud are buying up the chip to power artificial intelligence and other functions.

Nvidia’s largest and oldest business of selling graphical processing units, or GPUs, for video game players beat analyst estimates, bringing in $1.8 billion compared with estimates of $1.75 billion, according to data from FactSet.

Analysts had braced for lower gaming chip sales because Nvidia is widely expected to unveil a new generation of gaming chips ahead of the holiday shopping seasons, possibly as soon as next week. Gamers typically hold off on purchasing chips when new models are just around the corner.